Gordon Bailey, one of the founders of The Nostalgia Journal (the fanzine that eventually became The Comics Journal), recently passed away.

Gordon Francis Bailey Jr., a contributor to early comics fandom in north Texas, passed away July 13 after a brief illness, according to his sister, Katherine Bailey. Gordon Bailey was part of The Syndicate — himself, Larry Herndon, Joe Bob Williams, and later Mark Lamberti — a group that created The Nostalgia Journal in the summer of 1974. TNJ ran for 26 issues before it was acquired by Gary Groth and Michael Catron of Fantagraphics and became, first, The New Nostalgia Journal and then The Comics Journal. Bailey helped organize early conventions in north Texas and Oklahoma, and wrote about some of them in Trek in Texas — The 1970s Star Trek Conventions, one of his 18 self-published books.

Bailey was born July 21, 1956, lived most of his life in Fort Worth, Texas, and died a few days shy of his 60th birthday at Harris Medical Center in Fort Worth, the same hospital where he was born. He graduated from Eastern Hills High School in Fort Worth and attended North Texas State for a year.

He fell in love with journalism in the ninth grade and though not eligible to take the journalism course, he sat in on the classes anyway and was appointed editor of his high school paper while still a junior. His first magazine was The BiWeekly Bomb — which was eventually banned by the high school administration. He collected comics, Mad magazines, and movie memorabilia throughout high school. Those loves persisted throughout his life. At 17 he published his first fanzine, Comic Fantasy Quarterly.

Because I was raised on a ranch in Idaho and I was the oldest with only younger brothers I was naturally outdoorsy; I still am, with all my sailing adventures. I didn’t want to be considered prissy, and I did nutso things like ride horses through thunderstorms bareback, kicking the horses to run and jump over barbed-wire fences. But I also wanted to wear Victorian lace dresses all the time and have tea parties with my dolls. I was vehement about being girly in a family where I felt like I had to fight against everyone trying to negate and marginalize the fact I was a girl.

So to escape and rebel, I put on my lacy white petticoat, my lipstick, and my glitter heels and ran to the faggiest place anyone could go, a fine art school in San Francisco, when I got a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute. Growing up that way, how did I have the chance to become anything else than the loud horrible passionate hardcore feminist that I am today? Love it or leave it, Patriarchy. It’s how I be.

—For The New Yorker, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan writes about the Berlin-based Indian cartoonist Sarnath Banerjee.

Banerjee’s success as a graphic novelist is, itself, a product of forces that have taken hold in the New India. As economic growth has fostered a new middle-class Anglophone reading public, interest in genre fiction has exploded. Indian readers of English can today find homegrown works of chick lit, techie lit, detective fiction, even what the scholar E. Dawson Varughese has called “crick lit”—fiction about cricket. India has long had a small but vibrant tradition of comic-book publishing, exemplified by the popular Amar Chitra Katha series, but today most major and independent Indian presses publish in the genre, while others are entirely dedicated to the graphic form. And, where popular titles of the past tended to depict Indian gods, fables, and folklore, today’s artists are interested in exploring the experience and contradictions of living in India now. When Banerjee’s first book, “Corridor,” about the patrons of a secondhand bookstall in Delhi, was published by Penguin Books India, in 2004, it was heralded as the country’s first graphic novel. In fact, that distinction belongs to Orijit Sen’s 1994 book “The River of Stories,” which chronicled the controversial construction of dams on the Narmada River. But, while Sen’s book was published with the help of an environmental-action group and had a limited release, Banerjee’s books, published by Penguin and HarperCollins India, have given momentum to a new generation of Indian graphic novelists.

Homestuck was the fourth comic Hussie serialized on his website, MS Paint Adventures. Previous comics were scripted on the fly by taking suggestions from readers, and the early installments of Homestuck carry over the audience-participation element. But by this point Hussie’s fanbase was too big for the interactive element to remain workable, and it was mostly abandoned within the first year. Homestuck opens with a PC-game prompt asking you to enter a name for the protagonist, but you don’t actually get to choose one. He’s John.

Old-school video games form the central aesthetic, from the pixilated art to the game-based ways the characters interact with their world. For example, John and his friends have to handle items by turning them into “captchalogue cards” and placing them in an inventory. This gets confusing when they start playing a video game with its own rules within their already video-game-based world.

In the opening pages, Hussie plugs merchandise for his previous MS Paint comic, Problem Sleuth. I respect the hell out of that.

Hussie and I share a love of bad movies in general and the work of Nicolas Cage in particular. I didn’t know this when I mentioned Con Air in my own comic, and now all the nerds think I was making a Homestuckreference. Nic Cage exists beyond our petty mortal webcomics world, people.

“You pull up to your COMPUTER. This is where you spend most of your time.” John spends the next 50 pages IMing his online friends while making half-assed efforts to leave his room and check the mailbox. The narration isn’t kidding around here.

Lauren Weinstein’s impossibly great and moving comic, Perfect Maine Vacation, gets a new home at Mutha. Lauren is here again showing how her ink gestures can equally serve realism and fantasy — and her prose voice is as distinctive as her drawing. I also like the economy of it. Every panel moves us deeper into her story space — there are no beats that ask that beg the “are you watching?” question, which is pretty common right now. It’s a wonder.

Jules Feiffer’s latest crime comic gets loves from the NY Times. I couldn’t make sense of the last one, but I love the idea of this series. Actually, that’s my reaction to like 90% of comics right now. It’s definitely my problem, but then there are comics like Lauren’s, or Anya Davidson’s hilarious stroll through any-city USA via SF tropes, Gloom Planet. Anya is, under the disguise of rock/witchcraft/SF, becoming one of our keenest and funniest observers of contemporary life. So maybe it’s all OK. I just can’t READ everything anymore. That’s what’s so weird.

You might have missed this. Gene Ahern, a popular newspaper cartoonist covered the tense, rancorous presidential nominations by sending Major Hoople, his Our Boarding House comic strip character, to the Republican and Democratic national conventions. It’s understandable if you didn’t happen to catch Ahern’s coverage in the funny pages. After all, it happened in 1928. That was a long time ago, in terms of American politics. But the presidential race of 2016 is similar to that long ago race between Herbert Hoover and Al Smith. According to Edgar E. Robinson’s The Presidential Vote 1896-1932, the 1928 presidential race was one in which “each candidate faced serious discontent within his party membership, and neither had the wholehearted support of the party organization.” Sound familiar? Beyond this similarity, the ensuing years have not diminished the amusement one can find in reading these cartoons and columns devoted to puncturing the hot air balloons of national politics.

Is it a sign of the times that one of our 10 greatest living cartoonists is on Patreon? Money is a very personal thing, and we have no way of knowing of what Chester Brown needs and doesn’t. Lord knows he has a supportive long term publisher. But, as he explains, royalties are up and down, and why not this rather than teaching or another “day job”. Certainly if there’s one artist to support in this world, it’s Chester Brown.

Here’s an oral history of Dark Horse on the occasion of the company’s 30th year.

MOK: As we talked about in our conversation in Comics Workbook #9, the intimacy in your work enacts boundaries. (Cartoonist Laura Knetzger blurbed that the comics are “Searching and sincere, yet guarded.”) In your series Internet Comics, the narrator of that work says “don’t @ me,” and here in this book, the narrator says, “I don’t care right now” and “If I see you, I will walk away.” Who are these narrators? Are they wholly you or a combination of fictionalized elements?

ODOMO: All of the narrators are me. Or versions of myself. They could be anybody but they’re actually me. They’re not anyone else. Those pages are more about the person or people I’m addressing. In Internet Comics, I’m talking about like… having privacy. Or like agency. Like, treat me like a person instead of someone who makes memes for you to reblog. I’m not here for anyone to be like “oh this comic is literally about me” because it’s not. It’s about me, because who else is going to make comics about people like me?

“I don’t care right now” is… I don’t know, exactly what it sounds like. I didn’t really care about that page, I just knew I wanted to say those words. That page is kind of like “I can do whatever I want and I choose to do this.”

The “If I see you” page is about burned bridges and like all the people that screw you over or whatever and try to be friends or forget it ever happened. I’m not going to forget, I’m not going to fight you about it, but I’m not going to be your friend either.

Elsewhere:

Congrats to pal Dash Shaw, whose film My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea is debuting at the New York Film Festival this year.

Zack Davisson:Kitaro is a yokai—the last survivor of the Ghost Tribe of underground dwelling monsters. He is nearly indestructible, and has a wide range of powers and objects like his hair which can be fired in in a needle attack, and his powerful chan-chanko vest sewn from the hair of his ancestors.He’s got magic sandals, a snake that lives in his stomach, and a remote-control hand.

Even though he is a yokai himself, Kitaro uses his powers to battle against bad yokai that threaten humanity—think of him as a Japanese Hellboy, only 1,000 times weirder.

I like that description of him as a Japanese Hellboy, which I think is very apt, though Kitaro skews a younger. Could you talk a little about what the yokai are? I know that you’ve studied this and written a lot about the topic.

That’s a deeply complicated question that has been the subject of several books! There’s not a single definition of yokai, any more than there is of “monster” or “spirit.” Everyone will have their own definition. For me, I go by the Edo period usage of the word, which is how Mizuki tended to use it; a personification of supernatural energy. There is an old belief in Japan that the world is infused with latent magical energy, and this energy occasionally manifests into physical form. This yokai energy can take almost any shape imaginable, visible and invisible. There are hundreds of thousands of different kinds. All of the mystery spots of the world, all of the beasties and boggarts, are all this same energy given form—yokai.

It was once the bane of the comics connoisseur: the “Comics Have Finally Grown Up” article. Enlightened readers know that for decades, if not centuries, cartoonists around the world have been creating sophisticated art for smart folks, young and old. Thankfully, that article, of which there have been too many for too long, has fallen by the wayside. But an equally specious think-piece is emerging to fill the vacuum: the “Comics Can’t Grow Up Unless It Promotes the Kinds of Things I Like” essay. Of course, the writer never puts it quite that directly.

In a popular subgenre of the “Comics Can’t Grow Up Unless…” piece, the writer argues that the “medium” cannot mature or progress unless it values and supports children’s and YA graphic novels. The majority of comics I read are for children and teenagers, but I don’t expect, or require, you to share my enthusiasm for Little Dot, Our Love Story, Bunny, Wonder Book of Rubber, Fast Willie Jackson, or Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen (I also teach Children’s Literature for a living). It’s weird to say that “comics” won’t be fully grown until “it” embraces books for people who are not fully grown. Would anyone say the novel can’t mature unless it embraces paranormal teen fiction (which I’ve also taught)? No. Why do (some) comics critics say such weird things about comics?

Caitlin McGurk was destined to work in the comics industry. There were telltale signs during her childhood on Long Island. She remembers obsessively collecting and organizing comic book cards and admiring the pictures in the “Stations of the Cross” while waiting in the communion line at her Catholic church.

Was there any point in writing your books where you felt like the filter needed to be turned on, or that you had to tread lightly? Omigod, toootally. It’s so stupid. For example, I was telling a story about my boyfriend seeing me after hours. We were fooling around and I got my period. My parents were coming down the stairs and I shoved my boyfriend in the closet and he was covered in my blood. When I wrote it at the time I thought, “Well, my parents should never see this.” Because they didn’t know that I would sneak guys in. Also, “No one must ever see this because it’s so embarassing.” The whole time I was drawing I felt so mortified. And now I think back, “That was one of the best stories that I have! Why was I so embarassed by it?” I was a kid. Who cares?

His fostered talent at EC Comics, though, would land him in hot water with child psychologist Dr. Fredric Wertham and within the pages of his infamous 1954 book The Seduction of the Innocent—the book that began a decades long crusade against comics and ultimately the near destruction of the industry.

Among sixteen pages of reproduced illustrations from various comic books were two panels from Jack Davis’ The Haunt of Fear story “Foul Play!” The aptly named story recounts the tale of a dishonest baseball player who gets his comeuppance when his teammates decide to play baseball with his dismembered remains in the dead of night.

With encouragement from editor and collaborator Gene Weingarten, Thompson found an ideal showcase for his own writing in the form of Richard’s Poor Almanac, a weekly Sunday panel featured in The Washington Post. The sprawling, madcap Almanac presented “misinformation in handy cartoon form” on subjects ranging from traditional almanac fodder like weather phenomena and local fauna to entertainment and political news. “The ideal cartoon [for the Almanac] was made up off the top of my head with no research, with only its own comic logic holding it together,” noted the artist in The Art of Richard Thompson.

The most popular installment of Richard’s Poor Almanac, however, was carefully researched by Thompson. Upon learning that George W. Bush had opted not to invite an official poet to his inauguration ceremony in January 2001, Thompson composed his own poem from Bush malapropisms, and assembled them into a free-form verse entitled “Make the Pie Higher”. The cartoon was widely circulated online over the next year, was set to music by multiple composers, and earned its own entry on the fact-checking website Snopes.com.

At the end of his story, we have also included a few more tributes to Thompson, from Mo Willems, Universal Uclick editor Shena Wolf, and the Pixar director Pete Docter, who granted permission for us to reprint a few comic strips Thompson drew during the development of the film Inside Out.

As a fan of Cul de Sac, I was in awe of Richard’s ability to develop characters that were so wonderfully unique, specific and truthful. Alice Otterloop specifically seemed very close to the spirit of what we were after for Joy, so he seemed like he’d have a lot to offer. Rather than doing design work, I asked Richard to draw up some comic strips. My hope was this would help him focus on character attitude and acting, and not worry about what the characters looked like. This turned out to work well. […]

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles.Sara Lautman is profiled on A Case for Pencils.

My natural inclination is to keep my hand moving the whole time I’m drawing, which makes the art messier. Shaggy drawing is more than fine with me. I love Edward Koren, Gahan Wilson, William Steig, George Herriman and David Sipress, all artists who draw at varying degrees of shag and movement.